A tale from the trenches of science journalism

I get called fairly often for quick fact checks by science journalists, which is a good thing. I’ve also written a fair number of science pieces for publication, which get improved by good editors, which is also a good thing. But there are also ugly tales of bad editing and the difficult realities of getting science stories published, and I got one this morning that I post with the author’s permission.

I just read your post on journalist integrity, which reminded me to thank you again for your help with my article on zebrafish hair cells. I’m a recent graduate of an institutional science writing program and have been struggling to land freelance jobs as a science writer. My day job is in genetics research. One of my first real writing assignments was that article where I asked for your advice. Of course, I also interviewed the author of the study discussed in my piece. He corrected me when I asked if the inner ear in humans is similar to a fish’s lateral line. When I submitted the article, just shy of the 800 words I was asked to write, the editor said that the published piece had to be shortened a little. A few weeks later I checked the publication and found my article reduced to 360 words. I wasn’t happy, of course, but every journalist has dealt with this. However, when I began to read the piece I didn’t recognize it as anything I had written. I became worried so I did a sentence by sentence comparison. To my complete horror, out of 360 words there was only one sentence in the published piece and 3 or 4 fragments of sentences I had actually written; and the article was published with my name on it! I cannot in good faith use this article in my portfolio. Even more distressing, there in the published piece was the incorrect statement about likening the inner ear in humans to the lateral line in fish. The editor wrote it in without checking with me. Removed was any mention of neuromasts. The researcher I interviewed and I are colleagues, so what will he think when he reads this piece? I’m new at this, so whatever credibility I might have had is now lost. I don’t want to burn bridges with the editor since this is all I have going for me, but I need my name removed from that article. The entire thing should be withdrawn. It’s inaccurate and unethical.

I’ve heard a lot of stories like this. I’ve also talked to a fair number of science students who want to do science journalism, and they are typically idealistic and want to do right by the science…but what’s the point when media priorities are all focused on short-term profit, and when the management can willfully mangle your story?

One rotten apple

I recently argued that to scientists, accuracy is the most important element of a story (surprising, no?) in response to a journalist trying to claim that character and plot were more important. I also tried to make the case that accuracy and an interesting narrative aren’t mutually incompatible — and I should have added that accuracy ought to be the number one priority for science journalists, too.

In case you’re wondering why so many scientists are distrustful of science journalists, you should take a look at this account from Ben Goldacre. A masters student in psychology gave a talk at a science conference to present her preliminary findings, which, sad to say, were picked up by the Telegraph.

Here’s the title of the Telegraph story.

Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists
Women who drink alcohol, wear short skirts and are outgoing are more likely to be raped, claim scientists at the University of Leicester

Here’s the actual title of the press release from the University of Leicester describing the work.

Promiscuous men more likely to rape

There seems to be a significant discrepancy in emphasis, yes?

Goldacre called up the student researcher, and got the straight story: the Telegraph title is factually wrong, they found no statistically significant result corresponding to that claim. And here’s the reaction of the investigator:

When I saw the article my heart completely sank, and it made me really angry, given how sensitive this subject is. To be making claims like the Telegraph did, in my name, places all the blame on women, which is not what we were doing at all. I just felt really angry about how wrong they’d got this study.

I think science journalism is valuable and important, and in order to earn the trust of both scientists and the public, it needs to make honest, accurate reporting its chief value. Lately, there have been too many instances of a violation of that trust — and bending a story to more comfortably fit a common and erroneous stereotype is a perfect example of bad reporting.

It probably does produce more contented readers, though. Or at least, in this case, contented male readers.

Cheesy pablum for Jebus

Oh, dog. Discussion of the conflict between science and religion. Francis Collins comes up first. Atheists are shrill. Human genome. Morality is a pointer to god. C.S. Lewis. Fine tuning. Atheists are arrogant. Atheists are fundamentalists. Atheism is irrational. Read my BioLogos website. The usual appalling Collins drivel.

Next up…you’d think anything would be a relief after that tepid, tired inanity, wouldn’t you? But no. Who is the complement to the pious, gullible, nice Dr Collins? Someone who might offer a different point of view? Someone who might spark some real discussion? Someone who might, you know, disagree?

It’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty.

Jebus. What a pile of brainless, self-congratulatory pudding pretending to be a discussion of substance. And then the reporters in attendance dish it up with a spoon, and they gum it over with their soft, toothless questions, and everyone dies of sugar poisoning.

No, I lied. The ending is even worse.

Francis Collins picks up his guitar and sings.

Praise the source of faith and learning that has sparked and stoked the mind
With a passion for discerning how the world has been designed.
Let the sense of wonder flowing from the wonders we survey
Keep our faith forever growing and renew our need to pray.

That’s where I began projectile vomiting. Horked up my spleen right on my keyboard, blood squirted out of my eyeballs, and my howls set the small vermin lurking in the walls of my house scuttling to throw themselves beneath the wheels of passing vehicles in a massive and merciful act of suicide.

It’s Loving Day!

It wasn’t that long ago that it was illegal in many states for black people to marry white people — this was the same kind of sentiment promoted by people who are defending marriage from gays nowadays, and I hope it will someday soon look as unbelievable as those old laws. Old laws? They were only overturned on this day in 1967, in the Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia!

Roy Zimmerman (with Laura Love, John McCutcheon, and Sandy O) has a song for this day, of course.

You can see the Lovings in this short news piece.

Aaargh! Obama screws up, very, very badly! I could forgive his religious leanings and vote for him, but denying civil rights to our citizens is not the kind of thing I can overlook. He must be hoping that the Republicans will nominate an extremely distasteful thug in the next election, so we’ll vote for him anyway.

My new career

I am now a cover model for CDs.

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Look for me soon to be gyrating in a rock video, then comes the feature role in soft-core porn, then the drugs and parties, then the stint in rehab, and finally the special documentary on VH1. Oh, heck, I’m going all the way: I’m taking over for Ozzie once he retires.

This is all predicated on the album being a hit, of course. But how can it not? Not only do I grace the cover art, but it has songs like “The Ecstasy of Mallard” and “Going Gay for House”.

Star Trek gets retconned

I finally saw the new Star Trek movie — I really do live way out in the boondocks, you know, and we only have one theater, with a single screen, and we had to wait for the Hannah Montana movie to run its course before we could bring in something interesting. Although, I’m afraid, it ultimately wasn’t that interesting.

There were some good elements to the movie. Star Trek was and is character driven, with these now-familiar personalities bouncing off of each other while resolving some esoteric skiffy crisis. That’s always been the fun part of a Trek movie, and this one preserves that and even turns it up to 11…so while I was in the theater, I was able to sit back with a bag of popcorn and enjoy myself. It’s definitely not a bad movie, and it even taps into fond old memories very effectively.

But here’s the problem: the plot was crap. The plot was mostly irrelevant to the movie, but even there, it was a series of semi-random events strung together by a need to reassemble the Trek cast of characters. The bad guy was just a madman with a great big spaceship and a doomsday weapon out to demolish the Federation of Planets because he thought he’d been wronged, and the starship Enterprise ping-pongs about chasing him down, picking up members of the cast, getting fresh Star Fleet Academy graduate James T. Kirk promoted, etc., etc., etc. Beating the evil villain seemed secondary to showing how Kirk met Spock, how Scotty got his job as engineer, and how uncannily Karl Urban channels the ghost of DeForest Kelley.

And then the real purpose of the movie emerged: it’s a retcon, a retroactive continuity adjustment, in which time travel is used to create an alternative history timeline for the characters. It’s plainly an attempt to restart the franchise, and this movie felt like a preliminary scene-setting effort, where the story didn’t so much matter and the important thing was to reconcile the fan base to new actors and variations from Trek canon.

That would be fine, except…this show has been going on for 43 years. I watched it avidly in its very first incarnation, and fondly remember pleading with my parents to stay up late on a school night so I could watch it. But there is a time to move on. I found myself wondering why actors would want to risk the fate of settling into comfortable archetypes — the original actors were pretty much type-cast after the show, and they at least had the advantage of being the people who forged those personalities. I thought about another series of movies with Kirk and Spock and Bones and Scotty and all those others, and many more plots with planet-destroying space villains, and yet more resolutions via deus ex Jefferies tube, deus ex particle polarity reversal, deus ex warp in the space-time continuum, and I just felt tired. Very tired. What I like in my science fiction is the new, not the familiar, and I don’t think this franchise is going to deliver what I desire.

I shall fan the flames and point out a couple of other things that bugged me.

  • Miniskirts. Uhura was one good flounce away from a major wardrobe malfunction. If it’s a matter of weird future fashion, they should go all the way and put the guys in g-strings and tube tops.

  • Did anyone notice the interior design of the Romulan ship? Funky weird platforms with no guardrails suspended over a huge empty space. Only the Mario Brothers could like that layout.

  • Somehow, all the familiar characters of the old show get themselves instantly put in charge of the bridge of the flagship of the Federation fleet. This does not compute.

  • People seemed to like the action sequences in space. I didn’t. In particular, there’s one scene where the Enterprise comes out of warp into a field of wreckage, all closely packed, and Sulu maneuvers his way through it all, bumping into a few bits here and there. That only makes sense if the velocity of a starship is like something under 20 miles an hour. (By the way, Firefly also did this. Hated it there, too.)

Katherine Kersten, Minnesota’s little pillock

Minnesota has more than a few local conservative wingnuts; there are a few very popular blogs emanating from these parts to testify that, and in addition, the major metropolitan newspaper, the Star Tribune, has a shrill blitherer they regularly put front and center who has most of us scratching our heads in wonder that they keep such an incompetent hack on the staff. All the Minnesotan readers here know already who I’m talking about, and I don’t even need to mention her name…but for all of you lucky out-of-staters, I’ll fill you in: it’s Katherine Kersten. “Who?”, you all say, and that’s definitely the right attitude. But we locals have to deal with the spike in our blood pressure when we read the paper and stumble across her byline.

What brings up this keening harpy of the right today is that she published another of her inane columns this weekend, and her target is atheism. She doesn’t like it, nosir.

More and more, we see outright hostility to religion — particularly to Christianity. Consider the wild popularity of a recent spate of best-sellers by “New Atheist” superstars, including Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and Christopher Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”

Far from being dispassionate critics of faith, the New Atheists are zealous crusaders for their own creed: materialism. They are passionately committed to the idea that the universe is a random accident, that transcendent truth is a myth, and that man’s life has no inherent purpose or meaning.

Well, yes! I think that’s great. There are no higher purposes discernible, but we happen to be here, so I think that looking for knowledge and value and even personal purpose in what is and what we are is far more sensible than asking a cold and mostly empty universe to whisper marching orders to us. Let’s strip away imaginary cosmic dictators (who are always nothing but an Oz-like showpiece to empower little, petty, earthly dictators anyway) and search for meaning in how we live our lives and how we can better the world for our children.

I accept the simplistic summary of my premises, but you know that Kersten has to go a step further, and tell me why I think that way…and of course she gets it wrong. I don’t think she actually has read the books she’s complaining about.

Why the growing audience for notions like these?

Religion poses a serious challenge to our cherished idea of personal autonomy. Unlike our forebears, we define freedom as the right to live as we choose — to “be ourselves” — unconstrained by social norms or a morally grounded sense of guilt or shame.

Atheists may not believe in gods, but we do believe in social norms. We also believe in limits to our rights to live as we choose — much as I might like to, I appreciate that bulldozing my neighborhood so that I can turn it into a slug and snail breeding ground would impose on my neighbors’ rights, so I don’t do it. I even appreciate that maintaining happy and cooperative neighbors is a greater good than having my own personal escargot farm.

I should think Kersten might have noticed that Christopher Hitchens always seems to appear in public fully dressed…and even in clothes that are quite conventional. I wonder why, if he’s unconstrained by social norms, he doesn’t appear naked, or dressed up as a clown?

She might have also noticed that Richard Dawkins doesn’t seem to have any pending arrest warrants (well, Oklahoma did try to criminalize him, but that’s different). He also seems to have succeeded in working within the social norms of academia, which, contrary to wingnut delusions, is actually not an anarcho-socialist ultra-Darwinian environment.

It all seems rather obvious to me, but Kersten persists in denying the evidence to the contrary. This seems to be a universal property of the religious — after all, if you can believe with no evidence that dead gods have walked the earth and turned water into alcoholic beverages, it must be trivial to accept that fellow law-abiding citizens with similar cultural preferences must actually be slavering sociopaths and unconscionable hedonists.

But this is all Kersten has got, the raising of spectral straw-men atheists who lack all restraint.

Judeo-Christianity throws a wrench in this, teaching that universal standards of right and wrong trump our personal desires.

In addition, it raises troubling questions about the vision of scientific “progress,” so central to our modern age. The mere fact that we are capable of, say, genetically altering or cloning human beings doesn’t give us moral license to do so, it cautions.

I always like how these doctrinaire promoters of “Judeo-Christianity” primly declare that they have such moral authority, when their faith has such a poor track record of promoting morality. Christians have advocated slavery, have murdered people for the awful crime of miscegenation, have decreed that people who don’t have the kind of sex they prefer are second-class citizens. Christians are thieves, murderers, rapists, and jay-walkers; it seems that having a belief in a transcendent authority actually doesn’t equate to being necessarily law-abiding and ethical or even, shocking as that may be, immune from the temptations of their natures.

I would very much like to see the Judeo-Christian documents that caution us about genetic alterations and cloning. These aren’t very biblical concepts, you know — there’s nothing in Leviticus about them. These are new phenomena, and the scientists who have worked on them haven’t necessarily been Christian or Jewish…yet somehow we’ve worked out that there are moral challenges in the technology without any dictates from burning bushes or salamanders handing out golden tablets.

Funny, that. You’d almost think that people were autonomous agents who recognized perils and responsibilities, and worked out among themselves what kinds of behaviors were right and would lead to less troublesome futures.

The entirety of Kersten’s piece is full of these nonsensical examples.

What, for example, is the source of the bedrock American belief in human equality? It has no basis in science or materialism. Some people are brilliant, powerful and assertive, while others can’t even tie their shoelaces. If “reason” alone is the standard, the notion of equality appears to be nonsense.

How can I even sort out that godawful muddle?

A belief in human equality also has no basis in the Judeo-Christian literature, which endorses inequity everywhere: there are “chosen” people, there are slaves, there are the righteous and the wicked, the crippled are excluded from the temples, the women are inferior chattel, the foreigners may be slain or enslaved.

Kersten herself asserts that equality is a “bedrock American belief”, and then goes on to show that she doesn’t really believe it — some people are brilliant, and others are stupid, and reason demonstrates that (to which I would add, so do Katherine Kersten’s columns…at least, they expose the latter half of her comparison).

Equality does not mean that everyone is a clone of each other with identical abilities, which would be in contradiction to reason and evidence. It is equality of opportunity that we are assigning — everyone should have the same rights and be granted the same chance to exercise their abilities as best they can. And that is something entirely compatible with reason.

And why should we act with charity toward the poorest and weakest among us? “Reason” — untempered by compassion — suggests that autistic children and Alzheimer’s sufferers are drags on society. In ancient Rome, disabled babies were left on hilltops to die. Why lavish care and resources on them?

We Americans take the moral principles of equality and compassion for granted. Yet these ideas are deeply counterintuitive. We’ve largely forgotten that their source is the once-revolutionary Judeo-Christian belief in a loving God, who created human beings in his image and decreed charity to be the first of virtues.

Why do these wackjobs always assume that reason and compassion are antagonistic? Reason tells me that it is a smart idea to be compassionate to the less privileged: maybe they have some ability that my society would find useful, to be pragmatic about it; there is no reason to assume that if someone is destitute, I must therefore do what I can to make their life more miserable; someone may be poorer or weaker than I am, but in turn, I’m poorer and weaker than someone else — does this warrant that I suffer? I also possess empathy, and when I see others harmed, I feel an echo of that pain myself. And, of course, perhaps someday I will have Alzheimer’s, and I’d rather not encourage the growth of a culture that would someday discard me.

I also think there are a set of ideas that are entirely the product of reason: that we should build a whole culture that enables and sustains equal rights and equal opportunities for everyone, because that will maximize the happiness and productivity of our society. I really don’t need a deity to tell me that, and it rarely seems to be a message promoted by religious hierarchies.

There are even more curiosities in that passage. Why does the right always talk as if Americans are exceptional? Do the French lack compassion, maybe, or are Canadians opposing equal rights for women and gays and Hispanics? It’s as if Kersten thinks moral principles are unique to this country.

And guess what: compassion and equality are not counterintuitive. Well, at least not among people who are not brought up with right-wing religious values. Children brought up in healthy, loving families seem to naturally share their toys, love puppies and kittens, and socialize well with other kids…all without reading books about it, or receiving psychic messages from angels. The source of these ideas isn’t Judeo-Christian at all: I’ve seen no evidence that Chinese children, for instance, are amoral beasts (well, no more so than any other kids), or that Inuit adults are unfeeling and don’t believe in justice.

We do have intrinsic natures that have been necessary to our success as a species: empathy, and the tendency to respond in kind to the actions of others. These can be accentuated by culture. We don’t need any gods to be good to others, just the opportunity and the examples of our upbringing.

Ah, well. That’s enough, you can see what level of ignorance went into Kersten’s complaints — she continues on to invoke Hitler, of course (he was trying to replace Christianity with reason, would you believe) and eugenics, which she claims is what happens when science is unconstrained by religion.

This is what readers of the Star Tribune have to groan over week after week. I really pity them, although it’s also the kind of thing that contributes to the decline of newspapers — pandering to ideology instead of intellect puts them on a par with propaganda organs.